Previews

Gladius

After spending the past few years beating the daylights out of its Star Wars franchise and teasing us with an occasional Indiana Jones or Monkey Island title, LucasArts is branching out. This year it'll let you take to the skies and do some WWII-era dogfighting and hit the road for some cartoony motorcycle action. It's most ambitious title, though, may be Gladius. It's an epic tactical RPG that'll have you building an army of gladiators one axe swing at a time.

Gladius lets you follow two separate storylines. You can play as either Valens, the son of a slain Hall of Fame caliber gladiator, or as Ursula, the daughter of a barbarian king. Whichever character you decide on, get ready to do some fighting, as the game plans to deliver almost 40 hours of play for each storyline. Thankfully, you won't be doing your scrapping alone. Fighting here is a team sport. And from the sword-wielding I got to do in a preview build, it's unlike that found in most RPGs.

The fighting is a clever mix of real-time and turn-based combat, with a healthy dose of tactical strategy tossed in. You can take your time and ponder all of your fighting options as in most turn-based games, but once you've made your decision, you're going to have to rely on your fast-twitch fibers to make it happen. You attack by using a strike meter. Hitting the correct button when the sliding cursor is in the target zone lands a real skull-crusher. The worse your timing is, however, the lamer your attack. I was a big fan of this kind of combat in the greatly underappreciated Shadow Hearts, so it's nice to see it pop-up again.

Movement in battle also distances Gladius from the pack of "my line of guys versus your line of guys"-style RPGs. You can't just target any of your enemies and go to town. You have to be within a certain distance to be able to reach out and whack them. The movement also opens up a wide range of possible strategies. At times, I almost felt like some medieval basketball coach trying to decide whether to play man-to-man or if it made more sense to double-team the opposition's most dangerous weapon. The game walks you through the intricacies of the combat with a helpful and wonderfully sarcastic tutorial.

In addition to there being two distinct stories to play through, the way each story unfolds should make for plenty of replay value. Unlike a lot of very linear games where you encounter and recruit new team members according to scripted events, in Gladius you'll be on your own to build your team from the cast of mercenary fighters that attend the various tournaments. Depending on how much cash or experience you have, you'll be able to woo new warriors to your squad. Experimenting with the way the various types of fighting classes work together and complement each other on the battlefield should keep this disk in your PS2 for a while.

Ready for DOA Xtreme Axe-Fighting?

The look of Gladius, still some weeks from release, is impressive. The attention to detail is fantastic. Battles will unfold in dozens of different arenas and venues and all have a distinct look. The arena battles I fought in the preview build were especially strong. I really got sucked into the thing and definitely got the feeling that I was the main event in a stadium full of blood-thirsty fans. After a particularly long-playing jag, I even began to inadvertently refer to myself in the third-person as "The Spaniard." The attention to detail carries over to the player models. There are over fifty different types of fighters that you'll be able to battle with or against, and each brings a different look to the game.

The sound is still in the final mixing stage. At various times, the voice acting proved to be solid, as did the sound effects and musical score. Unfortunately, the three never all came together at the same time, so I never got the full impact of what the finished audio will sound like.

Ummm ¿ A little help here?!?

For a lot of gamers, the late-summer and early-fall means football -- a violent game played by two opposing teams of powerful warriors. This year, gamers will be able to go real old-school in their battles over the line of scrimmage. Take away the ball, the score, and throw in some swords, battleaxes, and magic, and you'll have LucasArts' Gladius -- a tactical RPG that'll have you trying to assemble the fiercest team of fighters possible. If you want, you can think of it as NFL 1K4 or Madden 1153.